Vote Chess

I don't get the pages thing... How do I find out how many pages I have?

From the Main Menu bar at the top of the screen, go all the way to the left and you'll see "Play."  Put your mouse over that and you'll see a drop down menu.  The 5th one down is "Vote Chess."  Click on that and you'll see a page with a box that says "Search Vote Chess Games."  Click the box that says "Show Group vs Group Games."  Click "Search" and Sort by: "Games I am playing."  There's only 5 games per page tho, so it's not nearly as scarey as it sounds. 

Creating a Current Vote Games box or page somewhere listing how much time left before the vote should be fairly easy to implement, because we already have it for Online games.

Some of the other suggestions don't strike as so being of the same urgency.  Forcing everyone to post a comment in the games with 1200 or more players vs. a GM might lead to pandemonium, and I am not sure if it would improve the quality of the chess at all.

The same goes for having a list of how people voted.  A list of 1200 players' votes might be a bit unwieldy.  In small teams, it tends to be obvious who is voting for the bad moves.  There was one player in the Becerra game who never seemed to read anyone's comments, but turn after turn he would boldly post the move he was voting for, even when it dropped a pawn or left a piece en prise.  I always appreciated his honesty, but I am not sure I really need to know who it is that votes for all the extreme blunders, just so long as those moves don't get voted in.

Billium wrote:

White Team - Black Team - Game Name - Moves - Time Left - Status

The status could be: Waiting / My Move/ Voted

Sounds perfect.  Just what we need.  When is chess.com 3.0 scheduled to be unveiled?

Yes! The issue of games going time out and the drive by and other voting issues are totally separate issues. I was really hoping someone here could come up with some way of preventing the time-outs from occurring but it seems we have explored all avenues available to us and we are left standing where we started. I do not expect chess.com to do anything about this. Many of these problems and suggestions have already been discussed in previous forums and there have been no changes made to the vote chess format. The staff is mostly concerned with blitz and live chess and video presentations and portables. Vote chess is a very low priority item.

There have been a lot of interesting ideas given about how voting could be improved but one thing I am not in favor of is forcing or requiring anybody to do anything. Nor do I favor granting special rights to admins or team captains or anything like that. Every team member should be considered equal and free to act and vote as they see fit. However, I cannot stress strongly enough (and this comes from experience) that teamwork is what wins in vote chess.

100% agree there!!

Its simple, as already mentioned at least once...a drop down style menu of vote games in progress much like the online chess page is what is required. It merely needs an extra option on the drop down 'Home' and a reminder sent out in the last few hours of the allocated time limit. I say simple, the IT experts may disagree?

Further to Wormrose's comments i too would not want to see the admins take responsibility of the votes...if minor changes to the system were made admins would not need to baby sit each game just in case a vote was missed.

I'm glad my initial comments sparked such a healthy discussion

 Thanks! I have 40 pages but only 26 are being played

This forum thread is 4 pages long and growing, with no input whatsoever from Chess.com staff... Sadly, wormrose (post #69) seems to be right.

I think chess.com are waiting till we have discussed the issues out. Ruffsteve started this thread under Site Feedback and Suggestions. Even if they don't monitor anything - and they do - they should monitor this.

Well, maybe add another stick to the fire then...

The ranking of vote chess teams.

First, I would like to know how current points are calculated?

At the moment teams seem to be rewarded for number of games played, regardless of the outcome. I would much prefer some sort of system that reflects the actual strength of the team.

Apparently there are not enough vote games for an acurate rating system, bul I would favour some kind of ladder.

When chess.com unveiled Live Chess 2.0, they also tinkered with Vote Chess, and made some improvements (eg. eliminating the opposing team voting leak).  I fully expect that next time they do a major upgrade of the site that they may try to implement a My Current Vote Games page, as has been suggested here.  They already have that sort of page for Online Games, so it would not be difficult to program I expect.

The Vote Chess Leaderboard as it stands does give a poor picture of which vote chess groups are the strongest.  Teams are awarded 5 points every time they win a game, and both sides get 2 points for a draw I believe.  An easy way to improve the situation would be to rank the teams in order of their Win %, but strangely at the moment, this does not seem to include draws (I.e. a group that has drawn all of its games has a Win% of 0).  Now that many vote groups have completed quite a few games, creating Glicko ratings would give a much better picture of which groups are the strongest.  I expect in the long-term chess.com will bring in a feature like this.

Vote Chess groups who have confidence in their skills are invited to compete in the Vote Chess League Head Quarters upcoming Open Swiss II.  It is expected that most of the strongest vote chess groups will be there, and it serves as a qualifier for the elite Vote Chess Masters tournament which is held each year.  You can find out more by visiting the Vote Chess League Tournaments group.

Since I posted my last comment nine days ago, I have seen three more vote games time-out in the early stages. Looks like the vote chess time-out is something we will have to live with.

I just did a quick count of the completed vote games of the 17 groups that I play vote chess with and found a total of 104 completed games of which 55 ended on a time-out. That's 53%. 28 of the 55 time-outs ended in fewer than 10 moves. So it looks like we can expect time-outs will claim close to half of the vote games which are started. bum-mer

I'm guessing that making a "My Vote Chess" page that looks and works like the "My Online Chess" page is probably more difficult than us non-programming types are aware of.  However, I still have faith in the abilities of the Chess.com staff and hope that this will still be a reality someday (I know a LOT of us would REALLY like to see this).

It would be nice to get some sort of response from site admin though. They've been quiet as the grave about this, unless I've missed it?

Agreed.  They're not normally this silent about stuff like this.  I'd like to know what they're thinking, regardless of what it is.

I'm not a non-programming type. I wrote software for ten years and I know how simple the solution is. A few lines of code and a few tweaks is all it would take. Most of it is already in place, it's just not in the right place.

I believe that creating a "My Vote Chess Games" page (with a link in the players' home page) would solve this problem to a large extent.

Giving timeout alerts on vote chess is also okay, but a bit too intrusive to my taste.

Creating a "My Vote Chess Games" section on one's home sounds like an excellent idea to me!

First a thanks to the person starting this thread for bringing it up, and to a teammate for pointing me towards it.

I am playing in multiple groups for the vote games because I think here the learning effect is high due of the communications. And also hate it when a game is lost or won on ‘timeout’. In all games there are multiple votes lost due of just knowing it too late.

To avoid this, I us the difficult menu combination 'play', 'vote chess', sort by 'games I am playing' what follows with a blank list, then mark 'show group vs. group games' and then press on search to see all the vote games I am playing in (including the games I played and ended)

This is a very complicated combination and I still have to go page by page and match by match to see if I did vote in those games. It is the only way that I found to see if I played. Found it by accident one year ago, and was very useful last September when there was a major update.

But as all before me said already, it would be a real pleasure to see this on ‘my online games page’ and the time out alert would save a lot of games from going out timed, especially in the smaller groups I am playing.

So also I ask polite to change this general problem to give vote chess much more votes in the games (what makes it a better team game)